Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes review – demo mission

The real Metal Gear Solid V won’t be out for years, but in the meantime this extended demo wants you to pay £30 for two hours of action.

The question of value for money is perhaps the most difficult issue of all when reviewing a video game. All reviews are subjective of course, but when commenting on gameplay features and visual elements you are at least dealing with constants, which can in most cases be compared to other similar games. But when it comes to price you’ve no idea what any particular person might be paying for a game, how much that money means to them, or how long they’ll play the game for. Saying that, we doubt anyone is going to be describing Ground Zeroes as being generous with its running time.

Konami and series creator Hideo Kojima have dug a deep, dark hole for themselves here and in most respects it’s hard to have much sympathy for them. The problems start with trying to explain what exactly Ground Zeroes is, with Konami opting for the description of prologue – similar to the Gran Turismo games.

But it’s a prologue to the ‘real’ Metal Gear Solid V, subtitled The Phantom Pain, which it’s hinted will not be out until late 2014 at the earliest and probably much later. Ground Zeroes isn’t a section from that game though, or even entirely similar in nature, as it’s also designed to ‘act as a bridge between the linearity of existing titles and the full open world environments of The Phantom Pain’.

It’s all very confusing, but all many will care about is that Ground Zeroes costs £30 and takes less than two hours to complete. Although even the price has been in flux, as Konami has had to change it once already and the digital versions for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but not the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, are £10 cheaper than the retail ones.

With those unavoidably vague background details out of the way we’ll move onto some positives: the visuals are stunning and arguably the most impressive yet seen on the next gen consoles. The imminent inFamous: Second Son runs it a close race, and indeed there are some similarities in the rendering engine and facial animation, but graphically this doesn’t put a foot wrong – with some especially impressive lighting and weather effects.

The story is set in 1975 and is essentially a sequel to Peace Walker, as you once again control Big Boss aka Naked Snake from Metal Gear Solid 3. The objective of Ground Zeroes is to rescue Paz and Chico, both from Peace Walker, from a Guantanamo Bay style prison in Cuba. Naturally there’s more to it than that, including a rivalry with an organisation known as XOF (Fox backwards, geddit?) but the one immediate relief is there are no mammoth length cut scenes. The ones at the beginning and end aren’t short, but by normal Metal Gear standards they’re minor interruptions.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4) – if you drive it’ll be over even faster…

What is a problem though is that the ending is clearly a segue into The Phantom Pain and so has no real resolution in itself. You can’t really describe Ground Zeroes as a short story because it has no proper ending, or even much obvious purpose. It’s more like playing the pre-title sequence from a James Bond movie and then being told you have to wait two years to see what happens afterwards.

In terms of the script itself there’s less outright nonsense than usual (although don’t try and make sense of the backstory files if you value your sanity) but it still often sounds like it’s been translated from the original Japanese by no more skilled an agent than Google Translate. And then of course there’s Kiefer Sutherland as Snake, a change in voiceover actor that still leaves us bemused.

Original voice artist David Hayter isn’t half the actor Sutherland is, but his strange style of diction and cartoonish delivery is much better suited to Kojima’s awkward style of dialogue. Hayter gets the material in a way Sutherland clearly doesn’t and despite now having a proper actor in the role the dialogue somehow seems even less believable as a result, especially as all the other characters are stuck with the usual bog-standard voiceover regulars.

But maybe getting used to Snake’s new voice is what was meant by bridging the gap to The Phantom Pain. In terms of gameplay though it’s hard to really see the need, as although the stealth mechanics have changed quite noticeably they’re now much more accessible than they ever were in the older Metal Gear Solid titles. In fact they’re surprisingly straightforward, and although some will no doubt call them dumbed down we found their fuss-free approach helped focus the mind on the job in hand.

There’s no on-screen indication of how hidden you are (so you actually have to be properly aware of your surroundings), no radar (ditto) and no stamina gauge. You do get a pair of binoculars (well, actually a monocular given Snake’s eye patch) to help you tag enemies Splinter Cell style though, which is very handy. Plus a few seconds of slow-mo if you’re spotted. But in return enemies can actually see more than five feet in front of them and no longer have the usual goldfish memory lapses.

The map for the mission isn’t that big but it is all open world, so you’re left to tackle the task of extracting Chico and Paz however you want. The two extremes are shooting your way out or sneaking around but naturally most people’s experience will be a mixture, as you desperately try to hide bodies you were forced to kill or karate chop a searchlight operator so he doesn’t give you away.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4) – get to da chopper!

A new option at your disposal is the ability to call in a friendly chopper to airlift yourself or prisoners, which leads to lots of interesting decisions about how much to try and clear a landing zone and whether to take out anti-aircraft defences, compared to just making a run for it.

But as you begin to learn the game’s systems, and more importantly your way around the map, your completion time begins to drop from more than two and a half hours to half that, and lower still. We never quite managed it ourselves but we’re willing to believe a skilled player could finish the whole thing in just 20 minutes.

After that you can unlock a set of five side missions that use the same setting but change the focus to combat or stealth, or just the backstory. They all have their own individual intro and credit sequences but none is longer than about 40 minutes and one is little more than 15. The final mission is different depending on whether you’re playing the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One version, with the latter involving Raiden and some references to Kojima’s Snatcher series.

We’ve only played the PlayStation 4 version though and its extra mission involves taking pictures of scenes that resemble the original Metal Gear Solid on PS one, at which point you’re treated to a now and then comparison sequence. Considering how self-indulgent the series already is about its past its hardly essential stuff but hardcore fans might get a laugh out of it.

But again it all comes down to the price. We can’t see most players getting more than four or five hours of entertainment out of the game and that creates some serious questions about whether it’s worth acquiring. It’s certainly worth playing, and definitely has us anticipating The Phantom Pain, but a couple of decent trailers and a normal, free, demo would’ve done that just as well.

We just hope for Konami’s sake that their short term desire to fill their coffers doesn’t end up poisoning people’s feelings towards what has every chance of being the best Metal Gear yet.

In Short: A brief but entertaining prologue that is marred by the question of value for money and an empty story that has no resolution unless you buy the next game.

Pros: Amazing visuals with a great attention to detail and a minefield of hidden secrets. New stealth mechanics work very well and the open-ended approach is welcome. Fun extra missions.

Cons: Main mission can be beaten in two hours or less. The story has no proper ending and is very clearly just an extended advert for the ‘real’ game. Kiefer Sutherland does not impress as Snake.